That's the thing though, I posit that most people (myself included) want some level of guarantee and insurance on their money. That means that in a bitcoin world I wager that most people would actually use third party services to manage their assets. In order to offer a guarantee these services will ask to take over the assets to secure them in their digital vaults. And just like that you've reinvented the banking system. Note that I've seen a few instances of people on HN claiming that they were actually using cryptocurrencies for day-to-day purchases, only to admit that they actually use some kind of off-chain payment method like a coinbase credit card or similar[1]. Congrats, you've got a bank with extra steps.

Furthermore I want to point out that this "no refund" policy of cryptocurrencies is by design, there's no way to change that without effectively turning it into a "regular" centralized and "trustful" currency. It's not a feature, it is a technical limitation of the algorithm, the question is just whether it's a problematic one or not.

Meanwhile Visa and friends, if threatened, could relatively easily launch a competing product with the same characteristics (no chargeback, buyer pays the fees instead of the seller, etc...). I suspect that the main problem with starting something like that is that it would run afoul of existing regulation.

So basically the reason that we're not using Bitcoin-like currency right now is not because we couldn't do it before, it's because we actually realized that we didn't want it. The market has spoken!

[1] https://support.coinbase.com/customer/en/portal/articles/222...